Nice Profile On Rick Rubin And Stay Tuned For An Exclusive Interview With John Michael Montgomery

Brody Vercher | February 6th, 2007

The past couple of days seems to have been a little slow on the news front, but we’ve found a few things of interest. By the way, you’ll want to visit the site tomorrow, we’ve managed to land an email interview with Jenna’s favorite singer of all time…John Michael Montgomery! She said she was all giddy inside while she was reading his answers to our questions.

I know Rick Rubin most for the work he’s done with Johnny Cash, but his repertoire expands way beyond country music. He’s up for a Grammy Award this year and MSNBC has a nice article about Rubin and how he pushes the artists he works with to make great music.

Rubin had sought out Cash because he was interested in working with an established artist creatively adrift and neglected by the industry. Cash by the early 1990s had nearly given up recording. The deceptively simple approach they set upon of having Cash sing a wide swath of songs to sparse accompaniment yielded five albums (with a sixth posthumously to come) that energized his career.

We mentioned Jason Aldean’s new single, Johnny Cash, sometime last week. Upon hearing the title my interest was immediately piqued, but Country Universe has a review of the song and gives it a grade of C-. Johnny Cash is just a name mentioned in the chorus, so it’s not like the song is even about him. Hellocaitlint commented on the post and said that naming a song after another artist seems to be a new trend.

I missed Nashville Star last week…again, but one of the members over at Galleywinter mentioned that David St Romain was sportin’ a Jason Boland shirt; scroll down the thread to see the video. Also, check out this video on YouTube. It’s 25 minutes long, but holds your interest and even has appearances by Billy Joe Shaver and Dierks Bentley holding what I assume is his dog, nevertheless, he’s holding a dog.

MySA.com has some more excellent reviews of the concerts going on at the San Antonio Rodeo. Ramiro Burr writes about the rock-spiced country music of Big & Rich, go so far as to compare them to Gary Allan and a mix between Brooks & Dunn and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Benjamin Olivo tackles Gretchen Wilson’s concert – I didn’t know California Girls was about Paris Hilton (maybe Wilson didn’t mean it was about Hilton literally, but about girls like Hilton). Jim Kiest mentions that the Bellamy Brothers performance had a rather small crowd, but they turned in a decent show by playing a lot of their hits. And lastly, Jim Beal, Jr. says that Brooks & Dunn really know how to work the crowd. Jenna was present for the Brooks & Dunn concert, but she hasn’t been around for me to ask her opinion of it yet.